Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb

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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a rally in Greenville, S.C., on Sunday. He is aiming to win in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere.CreditCreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Senator Bernie Sanders vowed on Sunday to fight on after losing the Nevada caucuses, predicting that he would pull off a historic political upset by this summer’s party convention.

But the often overlooked delegate count in the Democratic primary shows Mr. Sanders slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote.

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded.

Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

“She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks’ time on Super Tuesday,” said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race.

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Speaking on CBS’s "Face the Nation" the day after losing the Nevada caucus to Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate, said his campaign is gaining momentum ahead of Super Tuesday.CreditCreditReuters

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle’s presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running.

“The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. “We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers.”

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters.

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama’s delegate strategy in 2008 and Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, said Mr. Sanders would need “surprising landslides in surprising places” if Mrs. Clinton did well on Super Tuesday. If Mrs. Clinton builds a small but stable lead, Mr. Sanders would need to overwhelm her in major primaries later in the spring.

“It is likely Sanders would have to win by double digits, if not by 20 points, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California to begin to crawl out of what seems like a small but, in fact, is a deep and persistent hole” in the delegate count, said Mr. Plouffe, who is supporting Mrs. Clinton.

Early on, the Clinton team identified the most advantageous congressional districts for winning more delegates — especially those that include large numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics. Some allies of Mrs. Clinton said a lead of 100 pledged delegates over Mr. Sanders would be enough to make it impossible for him to catch up, assuming Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy does not collapse. If she finishes the race in June with a lead in pledged delegates, her superdelegates are all but certain to remain loyal and clinch the nomination for her.

Mr. Sanders has his own ambitious plan to rack up delegates, but it faces tougher odds than Mrs. Clinton’s, even though only three states have voted.

The senator was counting on momentum from Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada to hobble Mrs. Clinton and energize his campaign through Super Tuesday, and then in Michigan and elsewhere in March. But he won only New Hampshire. His campaign is now spending heavily to win four of the Super Tuesday states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oklahoma — while taking victory for granted in a fifth, his home state of Vermont.

Mr. Devine, a veteran of presidential campaigns and a longtime expert in delegate strategy, said that if Mr. Sanders could end up close to Mrs. Clinton in the pledged delegate count, the senator and his team would lobby superdelegates from the states he won to reflect the will of their voters, defect from her and give him a margin to win the nomination.

Several Sanders supporters said they were counting on the proportional system of allocating delegates to keep Mr. Sanders in the race for several more months. While many Republican primaries award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, the Democratic rules can mean a long race when there are two or more strong candidates.

“Now other factors come into play like her emails and transcripts,” said State Senator Tick Segerblom of Nevada, a Sanders supporter, referring to controversies over Mrs. Clinton’s private server and the unreleased transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms.

Some Democrats pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s hiring of Jeffrey Berman, a consultant to the campaign and a leading Democratic thinker on delegate strategy, as a major advantage for her. Mr. Berman worked closely with Mr. Plouffe on the Obama campaign’s strategy of competing hard in every congressional district. Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign focused instead on winning the most delegate-rich states.

“Hillary should have been the nominee in 2008, but Berman was an old-fashioned delegate counter who bested her campaign’s approach,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studied the 2008 race for her 2015 book, “Primary Politics.” “She is clearly not making that mistake again.”

Mr. Berman said Mrs. Clinton had cleared some of the key hurdles in the delegate race, starting with a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, where she proved she could prevail in the caucus format after losing 13 of 14 caucuses to Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Sanders was widely expected to win more delegates than Mrs. Clinton in caucuses because they are driven by the sort of energized voters he has inspired. Instead, she came out ahead.

“The Clinton campaign is built for the long haul, much as the Obama campaign was in 2008,” Mr. Berman said.

Mr. Wasserman of The Cook Political Report said its analysis of the Nevada race bore out Mr. Berman’s point.

“By our math, Bernie Sanders needed to win 19 of Nevada’s 35 delegates to keep pace for the nomination nationally. Instead, Clinton won at least 19 delegates and possibly 20,” Mr. Wasserman said. “This is the first contest that’s provided real reassurance that she’s still the front-runner, and it robs Sanders of the one thing he had going for him recently — momentum.”